Remembering Gavin Creel: Broadway Looks Back With Pictures and Memories 2 Years After His Death

It’s been two years since Gavin Creel, a beloved member of the Broadway community, died on September 30, 2024, at age 48 after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer — but his memory lives on. 

The Tony Award winner, who learned in July 2024 that he was living with metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, died while under hospice care at his home in Manhattan. Broadway fans were shocked and devastated by the news, wondering how someone so full of life could be gone in an instant.  

“He gave meaning to everything,” Tony nominee and friend Melissa Errico exclusively tells BroadwayWorld. “Each word had the feeling of a wish.” 

Though Creel’s life tragically ended too soon, the actor had a prolific Broadway career following his Main Stem debut in 2002 in the lead role of Jimmy opposite Sutton Foster in Thoroughly Modern Millie. 

Steven Sater, the Tony Award-winning book writer and lyricist of Spring Awakening, recalls to BroadwayWorld what it was like seeing Creel take on a reading of his hit rock musical early on in his career. 

“It was his first New York gig,” Sater recalls. “When he sang at his audition, he was singing ‘Mirror Blue Night.’ He went so far back his hat fell off, and he almost fell over backwards singing it. He was so invested. That workshop meant so much to him.” 

Hearing Creel on early demos of Spring Awakening is now “devastating,” says Sater. However, by incorporating him on the musical’s upcoming 20th anniversary vinyl, “Gavin goes on,” Sater adds. “His life goes on. We still have his youth and his hope. … I miss him terribly. It didn’t make me miss him more. It made me feel acutely how much we lost and how much we had with him. How much he gave us.”

So many of Creel’s friends remember the late actor as kind and generous. Patti Murin, a close friend who at one point lived next door to Creel, tells BroadwayWorld that he’d do absolutely anything for the people he loved. 

“I was pregnant with my first child during the first four months of the pandemic, and I had an insatiable craving for Cadbury Eggs (it was Easter season),” the Frozen actress explains. “My husband [Colin Donnell] would get them for me whenever he went out to the grocery store, which of course was not terribly often in those days.” 

“We were sheltering in place up at our lake house, and Gavin lived directly next door to us,” she continues. “One day he texted and told us that he was going to the grocery store and asked if we needed anything. I told him I would really appreciate a Cadbury Egg, as my supply was running low. He came back with not one, not two, but nine Cadbury Eggs. He delivered them to our doorstep (from six feet away, of course) and said, ‘I bought every single one they had.’” 

“I have no doubt that if the store had 100 Cadbury Eggs, he would have bought all of those for me, too,” she says. “He was generous and kind and whimsical and complicated and one of the best people to ever walk this earth. I miss him every single day.” 

Spending time with the people he cared about was important to him. Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who met Creel when they were both cast in the 2001 City Center Encores! production of Hair, tells BroadwayWorld they became “instant friends.” 

“One of my most special memories with Gavin was a New Year’s Eve that he, Celia Keenan-Bolger and I spent together,” the Take Me Out Tony Award winner recalls. “Amanda Green generously let us use her house on Long Island for a little holiday escape. The three of us crawled into bed together, watched movies and poured over the box set of Oprah [Winfrey]’s greatest moments. Those quiet, ordinary moments are some of the ones I treasure most with Gavin.”

“He was a great conversationalist,” adds Ferguson. “He cared deeply about the world and wanted to have big conversations about how we could make it better. He was curious, thoughtful and deeply present with the people he loved. I feel so lucky that he was in my life.” 

Earlier this month, Sara Bareilles told The New York Times that Creel brought friends together even after his death. The late actor left “very specific instructions” in his will for a group to stay at New York’s Aman hotel, covering the suite and even planning for room service. “It’s so in his spirit,” the Good Grief artist — who worked with Creel on Waitress and Into the Woods — recalled.

Ashley Park, who was originally announced to star as Cinderella in the Encores! production of Into the Woods before its Broadway transfer, tells BroadwayWorld that one of her “biggest regrets in life is not being able to do” the show opposite Creel. 

“I remember him, when I was at the University of Michigan, coming to teach a masterclass,” she says of Creel, who graduated with a BFA from UMich in 1998. “We did a reading of a play when they had alumni come back. He was, especially to U of M musical theater majors, truly just the North Star for so many of us.” 

“I find that the people who are at the top of their craft are the most human and most humble,” Park says, adding that Creel was “just an incredible mentor.” 

Erich Bergen, who attended Stagedoor Manor summer camp with Creel when they were children, tells BroadwayWorld that he made everyone feel “seen and heard.”

“He was a constant source of inspiration to me as a performer,” adds the Boop! The Musical actor. “I mean, no one sang like that. He was an inspiration to me as a singer, but I couldn’t even dare to do the things vocally that he did. I basically was more in awe of him.” 

Calling Creel “a person who was filled with so much kindness and stillness,” Bergen says that every encounter he had with him was “filled with so much joy.” 

“He found a way of making me — and I’m sure many, many other people — feel like they were very close to him, and that is an incredible gift,” he says. “Having nothing to do with being an artist, that’s just an incredible gift as a human — but then to be the artist that he was on top of that all, it’s quite remarkable.” 

Claybourne Elder was another person inspired by Creel’s infinite talent, explaining that he’ll never forget listening to the actor on the 2004 album of Bounce by Stephen Sondheim. When Elder got to New York City, his first job was in the Off-Broadway production of Road Show (formerly Bounce). 

“The next time that song ‘Talent’ got recorded, I was the person going to record it,” Elder explains. “Gavin wrote me the most kind message about having come to see the show and how great he thought I was. … He was always so completely generous in his compliments and in his belief in other people. And it’s something that gave me so much confidence and comfort in a time when I was feeling very insecure.” 

Speaking of Creel’s one-of-a-kind voice, Tony-winning songwriter Jason Robert Brown tells BroadwayWorld, “Every time he sang one of my songs, I thought, ‘Ah, that’s what it’s supposed to sound like.’” 

Brown explains that he spent a week with Creel in 2023 when he played the lead role in Less, a show he’s writing with Doug Wright based on Andrew Sean Greer’s novel. “We didn’t start out writing Less for Gavin, but at a certain point in the process, it just became obvious that he was who should star in it,” says Brown. “He was without question the most charismatic actor I’ve ever known, and a singer of unparalleled musicianship and extraordinary tone.” 

Aside from his talent, one of Creel’s “many gifts” was making people “feel like you were soulmates,” Brown says. “Gavin had a way of taking in everything you were saying and really carrying it, connecting to it. When I talked to Gavin, I felt heard, and I felt a real responsibility to return that kind of attention when he talked to me.”

“Six months after the Less reading, there was a Miscast benefit where I was being honored,” Brown explains. “Gavin sang the big finale (a medley of ABBA songs), and while singing, he danced his way off the stage into the audience, shimmied to my table and kissed me on the lips while the audience cheered. That was the first time I kissed Gavin, and it was the last time I ever saw him.”

“We had a lot more music to make together,” Brown adds. “My anger that he’s not here is only mitigated by my gratitude that I got to be part of his life in the first place.”

Creel loved making music. According to Errico, “He waxed about how he loved doing concerts so much, repeating, ‘I love it, I love it!’ He did his first one in 2001. We talked about his pop star dreams.” 

Errico says that she and Creel spoke about his ambitions outside of musical theater on her YouTube channel just months before his untimely death. Though he felt “his timing for pop success was slightly ‘too soon,’” Errico explains that Creel “described he had ‘developed a concert style’ that was also ‘a philosophical journey,’ mixing originals with theater repertoire.” 

“Inspired, he spoke poetically about the concert art form — saying, ‘We are the ocean together, we have no idea where we are going to go, and there’s no boat… and I jump into the water with you. And I’ll toss out a lot of life rafts. Hold onto these,’” she recalls. “Fun fact? Music he listened to at home? ‘Meditation music, mostly.’ And his favorite song to sing? ‘Something’s Coming’ — ‘I’ll sing that song every concert of my life, just lower the key as I get older.’” 

“That’s just what I got from him: a feeling something (new) great is coming. Let’s not lose that feeling,” she says. “We celebrated his birthday on screen, and I sang him a parody of Sondheim’s ‘Everybody Loves Gavin’ while he blew out a blueberry cupcake I made. Blueberries, his favorite!” 

Despite the theater community’s monumental loss, Creel — whose legacy lives on through programs like the American Theatre Wing’s Gavin Creel Fellowships and the work he did with organizations like Broadway Impact — his friends have said they experience his presence all around them. 

“I feel Gavin with me all the time,” Tony Award winner Caissie Levy told People earlier this year. “I talk to him.” 

Cheyenne Jackson, one of Creel’s longtime friends, put things very simply, telling BroadwayWorld: “Miss you every day you shiny stinky beautiful unicorn.”

Photo Credit: Bruce Glikas